[NTLUG:Discuss] Hardware Question

[Steve Baker]

richard witt wrote:

> Did you try replacing the video card? I do not believe you will even
> get a single beep if you have a bad video card.

No - that's not true.  You get beep codes even with no video card
plugged in.  When I'm building a new PC from scratch, I plug in no more
than CPU into motherboard plus power supply and check that the beep code
says "Bad RAM".  Then I plug in the RAM module - and hopefully get the
one-beep "OK". THEN I plug in the video card and see if I get BIOS
output.  I do this because typically, my video card is the most
expensive thing in my PC and I want to be as sure as I can be that
everything else is working before I plug it in and (potentially) destroy it.

But the whole POINT of beep codes is for situations where the CPU can't
display a visual error code because either the video card isn't working
or the RAM isn't working so there is no way for the CPU to initialise
the graphics chip.

The BIOS software that does the beep test can run with nothing much more
than the BIOS chip and the CPU (and of course, power to run them and
motherboard services to let them talk to each other).   But the whole
point is to provide some kind of a hint as to what's going on while
using the minimum possible number of components.